Mozilla moves quickly to fix vulnerability that was being actively exploited in attacks against Tor Browser, which is based on Firefox.

Late afternoon on November 30, Mozilla rushed out an emergency update for its open-source Firefox web browser, fixing a zero-day vulnerability that was being actively exploited by attackers. The vulnerability was used in attacks against the Tor web browser which is based on Firefox.

More than 100,000 people in the UK have had their internet access cut after a string of service providers were hit by what is believed to be a coordinated cyber-attack, taking the number affected in Europe up to about a million.

TalkTalk, one of Britain’s biggest service providers, the Post Office and the Hull-based KCom were all affected by the malware known as the Mirai worm, which is spread via compromised computers.

The Post Office said 100,000 customers had experienced problems since the attack began on Sunday and KCom put its figure at about 10,000 customers since Saturday. TalkTalk confirmed that it had also been affected but declined to give a precise number of customers involved.

More than 900,000 customers of German ISP Deutsche Telekom (DT) were knocked offline this week after their Internet routers got infected by a new variant of a computer worm known as Mirai. The malware wriggled inside the routers via a newly discovered vulnerability in a feature that allows ISPs to remotely upgrade the firmware on the devices. But the new Mirai malware turns that feature off once it infests a device, complicating DT’s cleanup and restoration efforts.

Well,Just months back Linux Mint 18 got it's release,now it is the time to have the next point release of Linux Mint 18.Just few hours ago Linux Mint team has announced the availability of Linux Mint 18.1 Beta.
As Linux Mint users , who have already moved to Linux Mint 18, might be loving it for the newly introduced themes,look & feel and features(of course,they didn't go like updating only pre-installed packages ).So,in this time, coming from rainy to winter season,they have made a good list of new improvements,features and support.

The number of corporate apologies has increased dramatically over the past decade. And for good reason: Failing to admit a mistake is one of the fastest ways a CEO can put themselves and their company’s reputation at risk. I’m not alone on this – 81 percent of Americans say a public apology from a CEO would be seen as a positive step during a crisis.

And yet, too many leaders still struggle to publicly acknowledge when they stumble. A 2013 study by Forum Corporation found that of the nearly 1,000 global leaders and employees surveyed, only 19% of employees said their bosses were willing to apologize for mistakes.

Two days back we had a very productive meeting in the Fedora Atomic Working Group. This post is a summary of the meeting. You can find all the open issues of the working group in this Pagure repo. There were 14 people present at the meeting, which happens on every Wednesday 5PM UTC at the #fedora-meeting-1 channel on Freenode IRC server.

Using Pagure and COPR, Tim Flink and I have settled on using common infrastructure to further the inclusion of Phabricator in to the Fedora repositories (and EPEL). I’m hoping this will bear fruit and get more people on board.

During November I finally took the leap and offered to become a maintainer of GJS. My employer Endless has been sponsoring work on bugs 742249 and 751252, porting GJS’s Javascript engine from SpiderMonkey 24 to SpiderMonkey 31. But aside from that I had been getting interested in contributing more to it, and outside of work I did a bunch of maintenance work modernizing the Autotools scripts and getting it to compile without warnings. From there it was a small step to officially volunteering.

During last weekend, I was very happy to attend the Core Apps Hackfest in Berlin. This is effectively the first hackfest I’ve ever been! Thanks Carlos for organizing that, thanks Kinvolk folks for hosting the event, and Collabora for sponsoring the dinner.

This event was a great chance to meet the maintainers in person and talk directly to the designers about doubts we have. Since Carlos already wrote down the list of tasks we worked on, I’m not going to repeat it. So here, I’ll report what I was able to work on.

I’ve been rather quiet recently working on new features for Builder. But we managed to just release Builder 3.22.3 which is full of bug fixes and a really new important feature. You can now meaningfully target flatpak when building your application. Matthew Leeds has done this outstanding work and it is really going to simplify how you contribute to GNOME applications going forward.

I’m really happy with the quality of this feature because it has shown me where our LibIDE design has done well, and where it has not. Of course, we will address that for 3.24 to help make some of the UI less confusing.

Noevember 2016 was my third month as a Debian LTS team member. I was allocated 11 hours and had 1,75 hours left from October. This makes a total of 12,75 hours. In November I spent all 12,75 hours (and even a bit more) preparing security updates for spip, memcached and monit.

Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most software is distributed pre-compiled to end users.

The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to permit verification that no flaws have been introduced — either maliciously or accidentally — during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.

Android, the world’s most used mobile operating system, is going through a step change. For years, its creator, Google, only made a small number of own-brand devices running it for developers and enthusiasts. That changed with the release of the Pixel.

The Pixel is Google’s first real attempt to challenge Apple and Samsung’s smartphone dominance, but it wasn’t made by the same team that makes Android.

The Android software platform lets smartphone builders everywhere create devices for every niche. If Apple's iPhone is the gold standard against which all other phones must be measured, it's also a one-size-fits-all strategy with just a handful of models on the market at any given time.

As a direct result of Android's open architecture, the platform is sweeping world markets. According to the latest IDC report, 87.6 percent of the 344.7 million smartphones that shipped in the second quarter of 2016 were equipped with Android software. Another 11.7 percent came with Apple's iOS, leaving less than 1 percent of the pie to share among Windows Phone and other challengers.

So how did Android become such a success? Let's have a look in the rear-view mirror.

A company set up by former Nokia employees called HMD Global has licensed the Nokia brand name from Microsoft, struck partnerships with device manufacturer Foxconn and intends to launch an Android smartphone in the early part of 2017.

The first Nokia-branded handsets running Android are due to arrive early next year. After announcing its plans to return to tablets and phones back in May, Nokia is providing more details today as it formalizes a licensing agreement with HMD Global (HMD). Also based in Finland, HMD global is the new home of Nokia phones under a brand licensing deal that will last for at least 10 years.

Mark Shuttleworth just blogged about their stance against unofficial Ubuntu images. The assertion is that a cloud hoster is providing unofficial and modified Ubuntu images, and that these images are meaningfully different from upstream Ubuntu in terms of their functionality and security. Users are attempting to make use of these images, are finding that they don't work properly and are assuming that Ubuntu is a shoddy product. This is an entirely legitimate concern, and if Canonical are acting to reduce user confusion then they should be commended for that.

The appropriate means to handle this kind of issue is trademark law. If someone claims that something is Ubuntu when it isn't, that's probably an infringement of the trademark and it's entirely reasonable for the trademark owner to take action to protect the value associated with their trademark. But Canonical's IP policy goes much further than that - it can be interpreted as meaning[1] that you can't distribute works based on Ubuntu without paying Canonical for the privilege, even if you call it something other than Ubuntu.

The fourth maintenance update to the Enlightenment DR 0.21 stable series of the lightweight, modern, and open-source window manager and desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions has been released on the last day of November 2016.

One of the world's best open-source and cross-platform DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software, Ardour, has been updated to version 5.5 on the first day of December 2016, as announced by developer Paul Davis.

The Khronos Group made a brief announcement on Thursday, stating popular PC gaming peripheral maker Razer is now a Contributor Member. The Khronos Group is the non-profit consortium behind the new open-source Vulkan Application Programming Interface (API) that is becoming more commonly used in PC gaming. It’s an alternative to the long-used DirectX and OpenGL graphics APIs.

Razer joining The Khronos Group looks to be a VR/AR play, but will hopefully help further push Vulkan and other Khronos standards to gamers. The brief announcement at Khronos.org reads in part, "...Razer co-founded OSVR, an open-source platform that integrates VR, AR and mixed reality hardware and software APIs that support a universal VR ecosystem."

It's easy to think of containers and VMs as a binary choice -- deciding whether to use a VM or a container (not both) for your use case. In his keynote at LinuxCon Europe, Brandon Philips, CTO at CoreOS, talked about a case study for using VMs and containers together to take advantage of the strengths of both.

Is it ever too early for a Year in Review column? Didn’t think so. For this attempt, let’s take a look at the exciting trends in network virtualization (NV), as a mixture of open and proprietary technologies battle to be the cloud networking foundation of the future.

On the competitive front, we took a detailed look at the market in our “Future of Network Virtualization and SDN Controllers Report,” released in September. The market continues to grow, with a dynamic mixture of NV incumbents and startups gaining market traction.

Docker and Canonical on Wednesday announced a commercial agreement to integrate support for Docker Engine. The partnership gives Canonical customers a single path for support of the Ubuntu operating system and CS Docker Engine in enterprise Docker operations. It provides a streamlined operations and support experience for joint customers by splitting the service obligations in four ways. First, Docker will publish and update stable snap installation packages on Ubuntu, which will enable direct access to the Docker build for all Ubuntu users.

Mirantis, focused on the OpenStack cloud computing platform and ecosystem, has expanded its OpenStack training efforts in big ways over the past couple of years. But cloud deployments are increasingly becoming integrated with container technologies, and now Mirantis is expanding its training scope in recognition of that fact.

On the first day of December, Gooogle decided that it's time for the popular Chrome web browser to get a new release, so it promoted Chrome 55 to the stable channel for all supported platforms, including Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Crikey, folks: it’s December, and that means Christmas is shortly to be thrust upon us, whether we’re ready or not!

It can be tricky to come up with gift ideas for Linux users in your life. And since you’ve probably got more than enough turkey on your plate this holiday season — ho, ho, ho — we thought we’d be swell and save you from getting snowed under trying to find something to buy.

Or to put it in a less breathy sentence: we’ve got some top Linux gift ideas to help make festive shopping a little easier this season.

We (the gtkmm developers) have started work on an ABI-breaking gtkmm-4.0, as well as an ABI-breaking glibmm, target GTK+ 4, and letting us clean up some cruft that has gathered over the years. These install in parallel with the existing gtkmm-3.0 and glibmm-2.4 APIs/ABIs.

Gtkmm, the project providing the de facto C++ interface for GTK+, is preparing for the GTK+ 4.0 era.

Gtkmm 3.89.1 was released today as the first release based against the GTK+ 4.0 development code and can be installed in parallel with gtkmm-3.0. Aside from basing against GTK 4.0, gtkmm now uses C++14, has removed deprecated APIs, and other changes. Gtkmm using C++14 succeeds its C++11 usage.

With the start of the new month comes updated statistics from Valve with their Steam Survey.

For November 2016, the Steam Survey shows Linux with a 0.88% marketshare, or a decrease of 0.01%. Ubuntu 16.10 gained ground while the other popular Linux distributions saw no change to slight drops. Steam meanwhile saw 95.4% of users on Windows and 3.59% on macOS.

Today, I’m joining Mozilla’s Board. What attracts me to Mozilla is its people, mission and values. I’ve long admired Mozilla’s noble mission to ensure the internet is free, open and accessible to all. That Mozilla has organized itself in a radically transparent, massively distributed and crucially equitable way is a living example of its values in action and a testament to the integrity with which Mozillians have pursued that mission. They walk the talk. Similarly, having had the privilege of knowing a number of the leaders at Mozilla, their sincerity, character and competence are self-evident.

Today, we are very pleased to announce the latest addition to the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors – Julie Hanna. Julie is the Executive Chairman for Kiva and a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship and we couldn’t be more excited to have her joining our Board.

The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the December 2016 issue. With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community.

Today, we are happy to announce the release of KDevelop 5.0.3, the third bugfix and stabilization release for KDevelop 5.0. An upgrade to 5.0.3 is strongly recommended to all users of 5.0.0, 5.0.1 or 5.0.2.

Together with the source code, we again provide a prebuilt one-file-executable for 64-bit Linux, as well as binary installers for 32- and 64-bit Microsoft Windows. You can find them on our download page.

We are happy to announce OSS-Fuzz, a new Beta program developed over the past years with the Core Infrastructure Initiative community. This program will provide continuous fuzzing for select core open source software.

Open source software is the backbone of the many apps, sites, services, and networked things that make up “the internet.” It is important that the open source foundation be stable, secure, and reliable, as cracks and weaknesses impact all who build on it.

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.